Article / Tax Fraud

by St. Louis-Kansas City Carpenters Regional Council,Friday, August 10, 2018

Tax Fraud.

What is Wage Theft?

Wage theft happens when workers aren’t paid all or a part of the wages they earned. Another form of wage theft is not paying the legally mandated time-and-a-half overtime premium for hours worked in excess of 40 hours in a week. It is wage theft when any worker, no matter their immigration status, isn’t paid their complete wages. Often, wage theft is accompanied by tax and insurance fraud and other crimes.

...And It's Intentional

Wage theft isn’t an accident, it is a business model. Contractors often use crooked subcontractors or labor brokers in order to shield themselves from liability for wage theft, but they can still be held responsible as joint employers. And workers aren’t the only ones who get hurt by it. Wage theft gives cheating contractors a leg up when bidding against law-abiding companies. This means that le http:// gitimate companies, and the construction workers they fairly employ, lose work.

It's Not Small

This doesn’t just affect a few people. Across all industries, workers and their families lose $8 billion a year to wage theft. Construction workers in just six cities (Atlanta, Charlotte, Dallas, Houston, Miami and Nashville) had $30 million of their wages stolen in one year.